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to be constantly alert here. In contrast to such dreamlike-desolate night scenes, Neue Welt
also contains memorable sunlit tableaus. A double spread of an epic market scene in Ethiopia
looks like a perfectly arranged stage set or a realist painting from the nineteenth century, as
though you could never in fact chance on such a balanced, multi-layered scene in real life. This
picture of traders on dusty ground, this image with its complex web of gestures, poses, gazes,
colours (above all in the garments and clothing) and the plunging diagonals around which the
players are all grouped, looks like the vanishing point (forwards or backwards) of the many
images of rooms and buildings of the globalised economy, the gleaming chrome-finished
and granite-clad shopping malls, of speculative architecture, of shopping streets with huge
billboards or of people in shops stuffed with merchandise that we see in Neue Welt. In this
volume the photographs also reflect a heightened interest in materiality, in the sleekness and
edginess of commercial architecture and in urban scenarios in the non-places of globalised
society. It is a catalogue of textures – metallic paints, fake façades, glass and synthetics. Time
and again, pictures of car headlights, faceted and polished like insects’ eyes or primeval druzes
and geodes. Dangerous-looking, futurist-archaic forms found in some underground car park
in Tasmania, where Tillmans experienced something of an epiphany at the sight of recent
car design in all its grotesqueness. Or this unsettling still life: a mercilessly grasping claw at
a rubbish tip; a heap of jetsam that one is as keen to avoid cutting oneself on as on the sharp
shells of crustaceans lying on a table that seem to point to a hastily consumed meal. A parade
of disparate, heterogeneous materialities and textures, alternating with portraits of men in
work outfits and leisure clothing, of Wolfgang Tillmans’ partner Anders Clausen, of the aged
Gustav Metzger, who – like Nonkosi Khumalo – was seen in the first room of the Warsaw
exhibition. Tillmans presents glimpses of highly technologised workplaces, of an operating
theatre and an observatory. He photographs the night sky above Kilimanjaro, but draws attention
to the digital noise of the shot and thus foils any expectations viewers might have had of a
National Geographic aesthetic.
And he homes in on upper arms, napes of necks and folds in clothes. These are familiar
visual gestures, there are some quite astonishing continuities that initially may not seem
entirely in keeping with a book title promising a new world, until it becomes clear that the
movements in this body of work occur less in connection with motifs than in the sometimes
imperceptible changes in photography with regard to its technical and historical possibilities
and in the changes in the relationship that the artist has with his own medium.
Latent Pictures
In Neue Welt Tillmans’ photographic practice becomes even more differentiated than before.
It is not merely a document of his handling of digital technology, of his new-found delight in
the crassness and harshness of global junkspaces that can be represented and refined in highdefinition
mode very differently to what was possible using analogue equipment. Significantly,
above all in the first half of the book, he has interspersed the camera shots with images from
the Silver series, possibly his most difficult, least accessible group of works. For these works
are not only bereft of easily recognisable and explicable figurative elements, they also lack the
gestural aspect of the Freischwimmer and the three-dimensional corporeality of the creased
and folded Lighter images. Tillmans uses the stock colours from various colour photo paper
manufacturers, manipulates the chemical processes in the dark room by working with used
or impure developing fluids and uses the correspondingly dirtied rollers in the developing
equipment, so that debris and other mechanical traces are left on the surface of the paper. As a
result these images often appear strangely dry and dull, despite the fact that they are endlessly
nuanced in their morphology and give a vivid account of the phenomenon (and the process)